While my 17 years in game programming falls quite a bit short of Garriot's, I don't think the Ultima series was particularly taxing of the hardware the same way large open world 3D rendered games are.
Oh, it was. Ultima 6 was designed to run in 256 colours, in about 1990 IIRC. They had to provide dithered fallback modes for EGA, CGA and the others for it to work on the other hardware.
Ultima 7 was developed on something like a 386-33, but the target platform was a 386sx-16, if I remember the Ultima Dragons newsgroup correctly. The big problem they had was that the program was 16-bit, but needed to be able to access far more than the usual 640k in order to work correctly. After an enormous amount of optimisation, they got about 1 fps if they used swap, 4fps if they used XMS, 6fps via EMS and a whopping 16fps by using the flat-realmode hack on the 386. It was only that which allowed the game to ship, and it made the game pretty much impossible to run under Windows 95 and later until DOSbox came along.
Pagan (Ultima 8) used DPMI16 and 386 assembled optimisations to make it playable on the hardware du jour. This again caused major problems because the 16-bit protected mode interface only preserved the lower 16 bits of the registers, so when an interrupt occurred it would sometimes destroy the contents of EAX, ESI, EDI etc and crash the game randomly. This was fixed by hacking the DPMI kernel with some bizarre hack known as "Spanky" IIRC. "Protected mode kernel hacking" is listed in the credits of the game.
Ascension (U9) was released about a year too soon and was filled with software rendering and other weird things. It would only work at all on GLIDE at first and it had to be patched from 1.00 -> 1.03 -> 1.07 -> 1.18 before it really worked via Direct3D. I remember that though it worked nicely on a 400MHz machine with a 3DFX card, a far more powerful DirectX card would give you a slideshow until 1GHz machines came out.
Beg pardon, but did you mean 1KB? A megabyte was minicomputer memory when the Atom was current... Even 128K (if you meant megabit) was incredibly expensive in 1980 or whenever it was...
Aside from Elite, one of the classic games for the BBC was Citadel. I'm still amazed how it managed to fit about 100 screens worth of platform adventure game into 12k of memory without touching the disk after it had loaded. IIRC it ran in mode 2 - which took 20k out of the available 32k memory. I think they only used part of the screen and used the rest for storage with some weird trick to make it invisible. The Electron version (see link) couldn't do the hiding trick somehow.
The BBC version also spoke to you when the menu program loaded up, and to this day I think of it as "Seeta-toddle", which gives you some idea of the audio quality.
For those who are curious, there is a wikipedia entry here: Citadel (video game).
I do/have done both (run electrical and understand the implications), and GP has a point. When I think of the things in our house that *must* run on AC, it's only our fridge, freezer, and HVAC. Everything else in the house either converts it to DC or could run quite happily on DC.
I bet they don't all run at the same voltage, though.
Of the things I have that you'd expect to find in a normal home - my monitors and TV are all CRTs. For the monitors it's because I prefer the colour reproduction (want OLED!) and the TV hasn't died yet. I have a number of fans, a microwave oven and a condensing boiler - all of which are liable to die horribly if fed on DC. I'm not sure the printer would be too thrilled with it either since it probably uses a CW voltage multiplier or similar to drive the corona wire and/or laser.
On the more fringe side (a small home studio), half of my wall-warts actually output AC because the device needs to be able to step up to 48v to drive a microphone (I think they use CW multipliers, but I'm not sure). Even some of my synthesizers want 9v or 12v AC - why I really can't imagine since they're basically just computers anyway. I'll ignore the MSR-24 because it's PSU is the size of a small desktop PC and your emphasis is on eliminating small DC loads, I believe. However, even the normal, DC wall-warts output many and varied voltages from 3v-15v - even 36v for the mixing desk. Best case you'd probably be looking at a 12v supply for the house and using regulator ICs to drop it down, but I can't imagine that would be much more efficient than a myriad of switch-mode wall wart supplies.
I had enough problems with Windows screwing this over that I moved over to a combination of dedicated hardware and Linux to compose in. I was still using an old version of SONAR in windows until Windows 7 came along and killed support for the MIDI interfaces, at which point I gave up and ran the thing inside WINE instead.
I use Rosegarden for the final recording because it's far better at keeping sync than SONAR, at least in my experience. The time when the softsynths insisted on playing back 48KHz softsynth streams at 44KHz and I had to record it with the tape running fast to get it to remain in tune is still a very sore point with me.
However, my workflow and approach is probably like chalk and cheese to most other people. And in any case I'm not doing it professionally. If I was and I had to do it digitally, I'd do it on a mac, though. Windows for me has been nothing but pain when it comes to audio.
The problem there is that MS doesn't include support for other FS, they support NTFS, VFAT, ISO9660, UDF and that's about it
UDF is the real shame - it was originally supposed to be a Universal Disk Format which could be used on HDDs too, and had that worked everyone would be using that instead. But last I looked, windows will choke if you try to use UDF on anything other than an optical disk.
That was my impression. It starts with 'Do you know what GNOME is?' and then proceeds as if you use it. I never actually have unless you count Xubuntu which seems to be a weird mixture of XFCE and GNOME.
I'm jealous that you have one of those. I never got a chance to get my hands on one. Can you run Flash on there with Ubuntu?
Good point, I haven't looked into Flash yet. I did run Gnash for a bit, but that was earlier in the year, when the sound system could take the whole machine down. As for getting one, have you tried ebay? There were a lot which people sold on because they were expecting to install windows or something...
It appears to be working rather nicely on the Toshiba AC100. The zswap system seems to have made a big difference, as opposed to the earlier Ubuntu installs I was trying around June, which would constantly run out of memory and choke.
Sound seems to be headphones-only but that's still an improvement over requiring an external dongle for any sound at all.
I have noticed that Oblivion and Fallout 3 crash the sound system if they aren't run as Administrator. I don't know if TF2 has that problem, but it's worth trying, if you are currently running them as a normal user.
The text-to-speech and SIP VoIP components are also (AFAIK) specific to Google devices.
RIM is pretty f'ed in the head regarding text-to-speech. If I remember the developer licensing terms correctly, the penalty for making a Blackberry application that can speak involves being kicked off the developer program and having all your apps removed from the store.
The only chance to succeed is to offer the same front-end APIs/runtime/libs to work (adapted) on true Linux OS. You probably won't have full acceess to Posix, neither a hi-res screen in Tizen, but its native apps should run bigger and faster in a desktop just recompiling (or even better without recompiling).
Worst case, the NDK is probably "The Best Of POSIX", like the Android one. That alone would be useful, since you could reuse any Android NDK stuff, but what I really wanted out of Meego was something that can run SSH, Gimp and Pidgin on a tablet or ARM laptop.
Reading the announcement of Tizen, it looks like another Android, a linux backend with an interpreted front-end. It mentions HTML5 as the primary API, how well that will work remains to be seen. It mentions an NDK, but frankly, I was hoping for a replacement for the N900 OS, i.e. something that would run unmodified Linux applications - and this doesn't look like it.
That and the idea of developers having to target yet another incompatible platform alongside IOS, Android, RIM and that other one doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
SDDs at least in theory wear out in a predictable manner and can deal with the effects without data loss. Since flash fails on write, a SDD conceivably could (I don't know if any do that) reach a point where it says "that's it, no more redundancy left, read only access from now", which is a whole lot better than a head crash.
My boot drive failed by destroying half the Linux partition. I was able to copy off/etc, kernel config and a bunch of useful scripts and things, but most of it was just a bunch of unreadable sectors. Shortly afterwards the drive failed completely and was no longer recognised as a disk. It was just under a year old - I used the noatime option, swap was on an HDD and it was only about 3/4 full.
RIM's real problem - the reason there are no apps for their next-gen platform - is that they still haven't released a proper SDK for it AFAIK. They promised the ability to write native apps, Blackberry apps, and Android apps in such a way that they could be run on the Playbook, and to the best of my knowledge the Blackberry and Android layers still don't work and the Native SDK is still a month away in exactly the same way that fusion is 20 years away.
Unless things have changed very recently, the only way to make a Playbook application is in Adobe AIR which is really helpful if you're trying to port a C library from Android, Java code from Android, or port your old Blackberry application (if you were masochistic enough to write one).
Last I saw, a lot of the forum posts seemed to be along the lines of:
"Where can I get the NDK?"
"It's in private beta, uh, you can't have it."
"Oh. [disappears from the forum]"
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, just for completeness, some citations for Ultima 7 and 8, courtesy of Google Groups if anyone wants to know:
Ultima 7, voodoo memory manager
Ultima 8, Phar Lap dos extender post by Jason Ely
How do you ordinarily run games designed for Windows 3.1?
I've heard that Windows 3.11 will run inside DOSbox, if you have the install media for it. I haven't tried this myself yet, though.
While my 17 years in game programming falls quite a bit short of Garriot's, I don't think the Ultima series was particularly taxing of the hardware the same way large open world 3D rendered games are.
Oh, it was. Ultima 6 was designed to run in 256 colours, in about 1990 IIRC. They had to provide dithered fallback modes for EGA, CGA and the others for it to work on the other hardware.
Ultima 7 was developed on something like a 386-33, but the target platform was a 386sx-16, if I remember the Ultima Dragons newsgroup correctly. The big problem they had was that the program was 16-bit, but needed to be able to access far more than the usual 640k in order to work correctly. After an enormous amount of optimisation, they got about 1 fps if they used swap, 4fps if they used XMS, 6fps via EMS and a whopping 16fps by using the flat-realmode hack on the 386. It was only that which allowed the game to ship, and it made the game pretty much impossible to run under Windows 95 and later until DOSbox came along.
Pagan (Ultima 8) used DPMI16 and 386 assembled optimisations to make it playable on the hardware du jour. This again caused major problems because the 16-bit protected mode interface only preserved the lower 16 bits of the registers, so when an interrupt occurred it would sometimes destroy the contents of EAX, ESI, EDI etc and crash the game randomly. This was fixed by hacking the DPMI kernel with some bizarre hack known as "Spanky" IIRC. "Protected mode kernel hacking" is listed in the credits of the game.
Ascension (U9) was released about a year too soon and was filled with software rendering and other weird things. It would only work at all on GLIDE at first and it had to be patched from 1.00 -> 1.03 -> 1.07 -> 1.18 before it really worked via Direct3D. I remember that though it worked nicely on a 400MHz machine with a 3DFX card, a far more powerful DirectX card would give you a slideshow until 1GHz machines came out.
my first computer was an Acorn Atom..
It had a whole 1 Mb of RAM.
Beg pardon, but did you mean 1KB? A megabyte was minicomputer memory when the Atom was current... Even 128K (if you meant megabit) was incredibly expensive in 1980 or whenever it was...
Aside from Elite, one of the classic games for the BBC was Citadel. I'm still amazed how it managed to fit about 100 screens worth of platform adventure game into 12k of memory without touching the disk after it had loaded. IIRC it ran in mode 2 - which took 20k out of the available 32k memory. I think they only used part of the screen and used the rest for storage with some weird trick to make it invisible. The Electron version (see link) couldn't do the hiding trick somehow.
The BBC version also spoke to you when the menu program loaded up, and to this day I think of it as "Seeta-toddle", which gives you some idea of the audio quality.
For those who are curious, there is a wikipedia entry here: Citadel (video game).
I do/have done both (run electrical and understand the implications), and GP has a point. When I think of the things in our house that *must* run on AC, it's only our fridge, freezer, and HVAC. Everything else in the house either converts it to DC or could run quite happily on DC.
I bet they don't all run at the same voltage, though.
Of the things I have that you'd expect to find in a normal home - my monitors and TV are all CRTs. For the monitors it's because I prefer the colour reproduction (want OLED!) and the TV hasn't died yet. I have a number of fans, a microwave oven and a condensing boiler - all of which are liable to die horribly if fed on DC. I'm not sure the printer would be too thrilled with it either since it probably uses a CW voltage multiplier or similar to drive the corona wire and/or laser.
On the more fringe side (a small home studio), half of my wall-warts actually output AC because the device needs to be able to step up to 48v to drive a microphone (I think they use CW multipliers, but I'm not sure). Even some of my synthesizers want 9v or 12v AC - why I really can't imagine since they're basically just computers anyway. I'll ignore the MSR-24 because it's PSU is the size of a small desktop PC and your emphasis is on eliminating small DC loads, I believe. However, even the normal, DC wall-warts output many and varied voltages from 3v-15v - even 36v for the mixing desk. Best case you'd probably be looking at a 12v supply for the house and using regulator ICs to drop it down, but I can't imagine that would be much more efficient than a myriad of switch-mode wall wart supplies.
Dammit, missed! Posting to undo bogus moderation.
I had enough problems with Windows screwing this over that I moved over to a combination of dedicated hardware and Linux to compose in. I was still using an old version of SONAR in windows until Windows 7 came along and killed support for the MIDI interfaces, at which point I gave up and ran the thing inside WINE instead.
I use Rosegarden for the final recording because it's far better at keeping sync than SONAR, at least in my experience. The time when the softsynths insisted on playing back 48KHz softsynth streams at 44KHz and I had to record it with the tape running fast to get it to remain in tune is still a very sore point with me.
However, my workflow and approach is probably like chalk and cheese to most other people. And in any case I'm not doing it professionally. If I was and I had to do it digitally, I'd do it on a mac, though. Windows for me has been nothing but pain when it comes to audio.
The sequel came out a couple weeks ago, i just finished it yesterday.
Ah. In the UK, it's not released until the 14th.
I believe the sequel is due out later this month.
Does UK English really, honestly pronounce "patents" as "pay-tense," as heard in TFV?
Just wondering, because over here where I can't do a damned thing about ACTA, we say "pah-tents."
Pay-tents.
The problem there is that MS doesn't include support for other FS, they support NTFS, VFAT, ISO9660, UDF and that's about it
UDF is the real shame - it was originally supposed to be a Universal Disk Format which could be used on HDDs too, and had that worked everyone would be using that instead. But last I looked, windows will choke if you try to use UDF on anything other than an optical disk.
In Wales, the English rail announcements are female and the Welsh versions are male.
They exist, but the 1TB SSDs are really expensive. There was a story about OCZ's new one like yesterday.
I haven't seen a price for that one yet, but 1TB on a PCIe card goes for about £3'100 and I think that excludes 20% sales tax.
That was my impression. It starts with 'Do you know what GNOME is?' and then proceeds as if you use it. I never actually have unless you count Xubuntu which seems to be a weird mixture of XFCE and GNOME.
I'm jealous that you have one of those. I never got a chance to get my hands on one. Can you run Flash on there with Ubuntu?
Good point, I haven't looked into Flash yet. I did run Gnash for a bit, but that was earlier in the year, when the sound system could take the whole machine down. As for getting one, have you tried ebay? There were a lot which people sold on because they were expecting to install windows or something...
Sound seems to be headphones-only but that's still an improvement over requiring an external dongle for any sound at all.
What do you expect from a blog titled "Hoowstuffworks"?
I have noticed that Oblivion and Fallout 3 crash the sound system if they aren't run as Administrator. I don't know if TF2 has that problem, but it's worth trying, if you are currently running them as a normal user.
The text-to-speech and SIP VoIP components are also (AFAIK) specific to Google devices.
RIM is pretty f'ed in the head regarding text-to-speech. If I remember the developer licensing terms correctly, the penalty for making a Blackberry application that can speak involves being kicked off the developer program and having all your apps removed from the store.
How the hell have the relevant companies managed to screw up producing a Linux-based mobile phone OS/interface so badly?
Easy. Every time they got it working, they started again from scratch.
The only chance to succeed is to offer the same front-end APIs/runtime/libs to work (adapted) on true Linux OS. You probably won't have full acceess to Posix, neither a hi-res screen in Tizen, but its native apps should run bigger and faster in a desktop just recompiling (or even better without recompiling).
Worst case, the NDK is probably "The Best Of POSIX", like the Android one. That alone would be useful, since you could reuse any Android NDK stuff, but what I really wanted out of Meego was something that can run SSH, Gimp and Pidgin on a tablet or ARM laptop.
Reading the announcement of Tizen, it looks like another Android, a linux backend with an interpreted front-end. It mentions HTML5 as the primary API, how well that will work remains to be seen. It mentions an NDK, but frankly, I was hoping for a replacement for the N900 OS, i.e. something that would run unmodified Linux applications - and this doesn't look like it.
That and the idea of developers having to target yet another incompatible platform alongside IOS, Android, RIM and that other one doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
SDDs at least in theory wear out in a predictable manner and can deal with the effects without data loss. Since flash fails on write, a SDD conceivably could (I don't know if any do that) reach a point where it says "that's it, no more redundancy left, read only access from now", which is a whole lot better than a head crash.
My boot drive failed by destroying half the Linux partition. I was able to copy off /etc, kernel config and a bunch of useful scripts and things, but most of it was just a bunch of unreadable sectors. Shortly afterwards the drive failed completely and was no longer recognised as a disk. It was just under a year old - I used the noatime option, swap was on an HDD and it was only about 3/4 full.
RIM's real problem - the reason there are no apps for their next-gen platform - is that they still haven't released a proper SDK for it AFAIK. They promised the ability to write native apps, Blackberry apps, and Android apps in such a way that they could be run on the Playbook, and to the best of my knowledge the Blackberry and Android layers still don't work and the Native SDK is still a month away in exactly the same way that fusion is 20 years away.
Unless things have changed very recently, the only way to make a Playbook application is in Adobe AIR which is really helpful if you're trying to port a C library from Android, Java code from Android, or port your old Blackberry application (if you were masochistic enough to write one).
Last I saw, a lot of the forum posts seemed to be along the lines of:
"Where can I get the NDK?"
"It's in private beta, uh, you can't have it."
"Oh. [disappears from the forum]"